The Power of Pattern Recognition

When I was in my mid twenties, I moved from an apartment to a small rental house less than a mile from SeaWorld in Orlando, FL.? I could actually hear the Sea Lions barking at feeding time and also walk out into the street and look due east to see the launches from Cape Canaveral.??It was the first time I was living in a house, and hence the first time I had a garage (more like a carport with temporary walls).?

After moving in, my roommate and I were cleaning out junk left by the previous tenants in the carport when I found a cardboard box of random junk, including the first four cassettes of Tony Robbins?Personal Power program. Orlando is a traffic?heavy town and I started listening to those four cassettes over and over again on my daily commute. That ended up being a seminal moment for me, where my mind began a journey from thinking like a kid and a pawn, to thinking like a grown up and a leader. I stress the words "began a journey", because this was indeed a journey. A few years later, I found the whole personal power set in a yard sale (some silly person did NOT see the value of what they had) and this started a lifetime obsession with learning and personal development.?

30 years later, I'm listening to Tony being interviewed on a podcast and I still pick up gems from him.?

Here's one that stood out to me last week listening to the interview.

Analyze big successes and you'll tend to find three things:

1 - Pattern recognition. Failure comes from reacting, while good leadership comes from anticipating. When you recognize patterns, you can semi predict what is going to happen next. Others will comment that you seem to be psychic, but in fact, you're paying attention to the patterns and spotting them.?

2 - Leveraging the patterns. Seeing it coming is great. DOING something about it and taking action using the pattern levels you up. All the best investors do this. They take confidence in the patterns they see and take action, usually involving some risk, but the risk is calculated based on the pattern.

3 - Pattern creation. This is the genius level. When Mozart learned the piano, not only did he spot the pattern of his teacher, do it himself, but then he created his very own patterns that he ran with. Successful people adapt to the patterns they see, take action, but then they create their own patterns by adjusting or tweaking the patterns of other successful people.

Tony uses an example outside of sales to illustrate this.?

When did human beings go from survival (hunter gatherers) to establishing civilization, changing the environment to suit our needs? What was it that we locked on to as a species that took us from surviving to prospering?

The same 3 things about patterns, around seasons. Early humans recognized the pattern of seasons, helping them figure out that adapting to that pattern allows you to settle down, work the land, and escape the prison of having to wander to find food. You can create your own pattern of food security once you figure out when to plant and when to harvest. This is essential, because you can work as hard as you want trying to plant in winter, it won't yield crops. Doing the right things at the wrong times yields no outcomes. So the same 3 things came into play.

- We recognized seasons (pattern)

- We adjusted our actions to match those seasons (planting, harvesting, storing food for the winter)

- We created our own patterns to augment what we knew from the original pattern (eg, greenhouses, irrigation, etc).?

Now take this concept to your business and sales. What patterns come into view of we look for them? (eg certain companies set budgets at certain times)

What actions can we take, based on spotting the pattern, that yield better results.? I'm a sales coach, so when I hear this I think of patterns around prospecting activity, approach, process, etc.

If this causes a "where do I start?" moment in your brain, don't fret. Start with looking at the top sales people in your org or network. Look for patterns. What do they do? How often do they do it? What sequence do they do it in? Then start modeling off of them. Success leaves clues!